Currently, apparel designers face a number of challenges when creating garment patterns that will be used to manufacture a new article of clothing. Many of these issues relate to inherent challenges that arise when a designer goes between the two-dimensional (“2D”) environments of a drawing board, computer screen, or flat-cut pattern pieces to the fully assembled three-dimensional (“3D”) article of clothing. In particular, apparel designers encounter difficulties when a design element, such as a graphic or piece of artwork, is placed across a seam of a garment. The main issue in placing a design element over a seam of a garment is ensuring that the design elements stays aligned as it crosses the seam.
Historically, when a design element is going to cross a seam, a designer must measure and align that design element by hand. This is a very precise and time consuming process involving multiple steps to ensure that the design element aligns properly across the seam. The process requires a designer to align a design element as desired and then cut the design element into two or more pieces so that it can cross the seam properly. The cut made by the designer, however, does not simply consists of the designer cutting one design element in half. Instead, the designer must use 2 or more duplicates of the design element. This is because the designer must factor in an allowance, or an extra amount of material, that is added to each piece of the various parts of the design element so that when the seam is sewn during manufacturing, all of the parts of the design element come together to form a single and properly aligned image that is identical to the intended design element. Overall, the process is manually intensive and can require a trial and error process for even the most expertly skilled designers.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and a method for determining an allowance for a design element of a garment so that the design element will be properly aligned across the seams of that garment. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.